The leg buckled. She whirled toward Gaborn, and he jumped backward, throwing himself high in the air and somersaulting as her whip snapped beneath him.
Runes simmered on the face of the One True Master. The triad of bony plates on her head was nearly covered with ghostly blue fire. Despite all of the Dedicates that Gaborn had killed, few dark splotches appeared at all.
Gaborn landed on a Dedicate, then sprang backward again and again, drawing the One True Master away from Iome.
The monster approached, rasping. Wisps of darkness curled about Gaborn’s ankles. His thoughts became confused. He struggled to remain standing.
“Cut the child from your lover’s womb,” a voice whispered cruelly in his mind, “for it is tainted with evil.”
A vision passed before Gaborn’s eyes, in which he held the child from Iome’s womb, a vile monstrosity. He clutched its scrawny neck, peering at it, wondering how it could be so hideous, and the thing twisted in his hands. He saw now that it had four legs and two arms, that it was eyeless, and where its face should have been, bony head plates appeared while philia dangled like pink worms from its jaw.
Gaborn hurled the thing to the ground.
It peered up at him and made a mewling sound.
“Something wicked grows within her,” the One True Master whispered. “Cut it out. Save your people.”
Gaborn felt a horrible compulsion. He had a knife in his boot. It would be easy to reach down, slip the knife from its sheath, plunge the blade into Iome’s womb.
“You could rid the world of evil,” the voice whispered. “Isn’t that what you want?”
No! he told himself. It’s a child, not an evil. But a greater will seemed to seize him, and he heard a voice in his head whisper, “Yea, master, I do thy bidding.”
The One True Master lunged toward him, and Gaborn fell to his knees. He was lost in vision, sinking into a maelstrom of darkness that swirled all about.
“Master!” he called. And simultaneously, the One True Master and the Earth spoke at once, “Yes, my servant.”
“No,” Gaborn said to the One True Master. “I am not your servant.”
A strange light suddenly blazed in his mind. The horrid vision fled, and Gaborn found himself shaken, standing in the reavers’ Dedicates’ Keep. In his right hand he clutched his gore-covered reaver dart.
A light glowed at the far end of the cavern.
A strange animal cry came from the throat of the tunnel, and the One True Master whirled away from Gaborn.
Binnesman’s wylde stood there.
“Now,” the Earth whispered, “summon the Glories.”
The green woman raised her left hand in the air, forming runes swiftly. She spoke as if in a trance, her eyes vacant of thought, void of emotion. “The time has come, Old One, to leave your body behind. The lords of the netherworld demand it.”
The One True Master hissed in alarm, retreated from Gaborn. Her massive head swiveled left and right, as she sought to track both Gaborn and the wylde. Her philia waved frantically as she scented for danger.
The green woman howled and leapt a dozen feet at a stride, her face contorted in fury. Above her, white lights appeared, small at first, and dim, as if seen from a great distance. But they grew in brightness and size swiftly as they neared. Suddenly, the Glories were there, dozens of them, white ghostly shapes with wings of light.
The green woman raised her hand, and balls of lightning issued from it, went scattering through the air like flower petals tossed into the wind. The light snaked through the air, sizzling and crackling, and the whole room suddenly smelled as if a storm began to rage.
The reaver Dedicates hissed in despair and lurched backward, seeking to escape. Many threw their paws over their heads and dropped to the ground.
Gaborn watched calmly.
The green woman has come to kill the One True Master, Gaborn realized, and he thought, But I won’t give her the honor!
In that instant, the reaver queen swung her muzzle toward him, exposing her sweet triangle. On a monster this huge, the soft spot above her brain was a good eighteen inches across. She stood less than forty yards away.
Gaborn rushed from between two reavers and hurled his dart with all his might. Pain wracked his shoulder from strained tendons. The iron pole became a black blur. There was a thwack as it struck reaver flesh, and Gaborn stood for half a second, gazing in triumph.
The reaver dart struck, and then went ricocheting off the monster’s bony head plate. Purple blood pumped from the grazed wound. Yet the One True Master’s head still swiveled about.
The monster held her black staff and lunged as if to strike Gaborn, then glanced back, as if deciding that the wylde presented a greater danger.
The green woman raced forward as the monster pounced. For half a second, Gaborn was not sure if the green woman would strike before the monster crushed her.
But the wylde raised up both hands, as if to embrace the falling beast. Her arms and fingers lengthened, as though they were branches and twigs, growing thick over the years.
The two met, as if in an embrace, and the wylde howled one last time, a howl of triumph and release. In that instant, Gaborn saw her as she had been at the Seven Standing Stones when Binnesman had summoned her—a collection of twigs and stones and roots and dust.
And then she caught the One True Master.
There was a rumbling, and a violent rending, and roots broke into the rock and a thick trunk formed and began to spiral upward. The One True Master fell onto the wylde and let out a cruel hiss. She struggled violently, like a tarantula caught in the grasp of a scorpion, her huge legs scrabbling and tearing.
But a tree grew beneath her now, a tree with a trunk thicker than oak, and branches that pierced her and grew up through her body. The sinuous limbs shot through armored breastplates, sent tendrils and twigs growing through her skull and shoulders.
In an instant, a vast tree took form, its green branches as alive as snakes. It held the monster and crushed her and pierced her all at once.
The One True Master gaped and hissed. She craned her head back, as if suffering indescribable agony. Purple gore coursed from her wounds.
The monster swung its head left and right, trying to dislodge itself.
But the wylde held it, made it one with the Earth.
Within seconds the ghostly runes that simmered across the One True Master’s body winked out, like candles extinguished by a breeze.
Gaborn dropped to the ground, panting. You cannot kill a locus, he suspected. Its evil would only pass on to another.
Help me, he cried in his heart, seeking aid from the Glories.
There had been a darkness about the creature, a shadow that followed as it walked. Gaborn saw that specter now. It surged upward, like a sooty cloud, or a winged shadow. It hovered above the dead reaver, above the living tree.
And the Glories came. Distant lights seemed to break through the rock above, swirling down from the netherworld. They were faint at first, as if seen miles and miles away. But in a matter of seconds they were revealed.
They swooped like swallows upon wings of light, creatures at once beautiful and impossibly cruel. Larger than men they were, and though they had arms and legs, Gaborn thought they looked nothing like men. Their heads hinted at the ravenous faces of jackals, with sharp fangs and large eyes. Whether they were covered in hair or feathers, Gaborn could not tell. For to look at them was to invite death.
Gaborn threw up his hands, squinting.
The Glories circled the mist of darkness, like starlings mobbing a crow, driving it around and around and upward, spiraling through the air.
As Gaborn gazed up, it seemed that a conduit opened between worlds, and for just an instant he saw the skies of the Netherworld—stars so fierce that they made his heart jump, in a heaven so vast that it seemed forbidding.
The Glories pursued their prey upward through those heavens, lights as bright as the stars chasing a strange, amorphous shadow, spiraling up as if all of them were caught in a cyclone.